Almost as one, they all looked down toward the bottom of the room where, spared the ordeal of the receiving line, Stone’s three sons were surrounded by a crowd of younger folk and were keeping the waiters busy.
“What about the boys?” Magda asked, suspicion in every syllable.
“Ah, well. That, ah, that is to say—” Jones began to color slightly, realizing that he was speaking to the boys’ stepmother.
Stoner began to look worried, and Mazzare realized his own suspicions were building to match Magda’s. The comments that Bedmar had passed were falling into place in Mazzare’s mind with a certain lubricious inevitability. He narrowed his eyes. “I think you’d better overcome your embarrassment, Simon.”
Jones took a deep breath. He was now a fairly fetching shade of pink. “It’s like this. You know we asked the boys to come here with us as much to keep them out of mischief as anything else?”
Nods went around. It had, in point of fact, seemed like a good idea at the time. Mazzare could feel those words in the air, just as damning an indictment as ever they had been.
“And, ah, Frank asked if he could bring a date?”
The penny dropping with Magda was almost audible. “Schweinerei,” she murmured.
Stone put a hand on his wife’s arm. “Now, Magda, let’s not leap to conclusions—”
“I am not leaping to conclusions, Thomas,” she hissed. “I am making a reasonable inference from the data as reported to me.” She glared at him.
Mazzare winced. That one seemed to be common to all marriages he had seen in action. Hanni gave fair warning that she was about to go nuclear with Gus by quoting theology and Scripture at him. Magda used scientific jargon. In a moment of utter whimsy, he wondered if Stoner had learned any classical philosophy to use in his turn when—
He lost the train of thought to what Jones was saying “—but mostly the Venetians seem to be upset because she’s not wearing red shoes.”
“Red shoes?” Mazzare said, realizing that for a supposed diplomat he was altogether further behind this conversation than he ought to be. “That means—oh.”
Magda’s expression was a sight to scare children.
“Tom,” said Mazzare hastily, in the faint hope of smoothing this over before the mushroom cloud erupted, “will you have a word with Frank? Not so much about embarrassing us a little—”
“Speak for yourself, Larry,” Jones cut in, “but I am more than a little embarrassed.”
“Quite. Tom, I think we may have a problem here. We just brought three country boys and turned them loose in a city which is famous for its, ah—”
Magda muttered a very old-fashioned word in German.
“I was going to say courtesans, actually,” Mazzare said firmly. Not only had he heard what Magda had called the girl in question, but he’d also heard it used of women who’d been perfectly respectable before, and gone on to be perfectly respectable after they’d played out the bad hand of cards they’d been dealt. Clear moral categorizations were double-edged things, in his view. The world had some very tight corners in it. That was no life for a woman who wanted any self-respect, and he figured the alternative had to be very hard indeed to get her there. The last one he’d spoken to had narrowly escaped burning as a witch.
Then the incongruity hit him. “Hold on,” he said. “I thought I recognized that young lady.” Maybe two-thirds of the people present were wearing at least half-masks, and most of the people who were masked were wearing full grotesques of one sort or another. The various diplomatic parties were bare-faced, though, as were the doge and his retinue of city dignitaries. So was the girl accompanying Frank, which hardly fit—
“What’s the huddle for, guys?” Sharon asked, walking up.
“Hello, Sharon.” Mazzare nodded in the direction of the Stone boys. “Do you know anything about Frank’s date?”
Sharon grinned widely. “Someone told you?”
“Yes, someone told us,” Magda said. She was looking serene now, Mazzare noticed. Perfectly composed, serene and smooth. Like the flawless concrete curve of a mighty dam.
“Oh.” Sharon caught the mood. “I was just talking to the Spanish bishop’s guy—more like, he was talking to me—”